


Fair Youth

by SteadyLittleSoldier



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me by Your Name - André Aciman
Genre: Fair Youth, John Keats - Freeform, M/M, Other, Personification, Poetry, References to Shakespeare, Sculpture, agalmatophilia, artist, references to Greek mythology, sculptor, statuary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-02
Updated: 2018-07-02
Packaged: 2019-06-01 11:29:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15142118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SteadyLittleSoldier/pseuds/SteadyLittleSoldier
Summary: It is a substitute. It is frozen, in this Mediterranean breeze, stuck in this Italian summer, unchanging, ever present and never aging, and therefore escaping Death - precisely how Elio wants him to be; his pluperfect lover, his Fair Youth.Based onthis artby SailogS





	Fair Youth

**Author's Note:**

> "...I continued to imagine him as stuck in Italy somewhere, unreal and spectral."  
> "I pointed upstairs to the French windows of his room. Your eyes are forever there, I wanted to say, trapped in the sheer curtains, staring out from my bedroom upstairs where no one sleeps these days. When there’s a breeze and they swell and I look up from down here or stand outside on the balcony, I’ll catch myself thinking that you’re in there, staring out from your world to my world, saying, as you did on that one night when I found you on the rock, I’ve been happy here."
> 
> \- _Call Me By Your Name_ , André Aciman
> 
>  
> 
> Rating for mentions of self-pleasuring and/or fetishizing statues.

When the first light that Helios spares tumbles helplessly in through the wide-open French windows and falls onto his Oliver, Elio catches himself praying it would give it life. It is a substitute, but a necessary one, as a place you go to to think of far more beautiful places where you wish to be, but upon leaving, come to realize that you crave to be back now that you've seen the beautiful places and the memories, though imagined, are pulling you back. But it's not often he finds himself tracing its hard edges with his own soft, swollen lips; the absence of the rest of the body is a sharp reminder, like the flat of someone’s palm lightly slapping your cheek, again and again, nudging you to concentrate on reality. But sometimes the emptiness of his bed becomes too suffocating, as though the Earth has been rid of air; it remains large, he can run anywhere he wants, yet there is nowhere to go because he knows he won’t be able to find oxygen anywhere. 

 

It is not something he can hide, nor has he tried to. If his family or Mafalda can’t tell what it is, the star of David around its neck was confirmation enough. He knows his parents are worried, but there's nothing to worry about really. 

 

He found the clay without meaning it. And under the moonlight, he closed his eyes and touched the cold pile. 

_ Touch has a memory. _

By the new moon, he was finished. He knew. Because he counted the days with the moon now. And on a mildly cold drizzly night, he knew he had to preserve him, immortalize. He took out a tome from his father’s shelf that night with urgency as though the droplets were singing him a song of epilogues and the mattress had grown spikes.

He likes to think he went to town unnoticed the next day. Wet cement clung to his fingers as he, hollow-eyed, fell asleep that night.

Mafalda didn’t complain while cleaning the mess off the floor the day after, perhaps because she felt sorry. Yet he made a mess again for the plaster needed to be poured into the mold.

 

It looks nothing like his beloved, but it will do. He has loved him from when he was clay. 

“Elio…” he whispers in the darkness and brings him back to life every night. Calling him, not only by his own name as though it was Oliver’s, but to resurrect the sound of his name from Oliver's mouth. And he will find himself tracing the cement, reviving him. 

Nothing has changed, he feels the same to the touch.

 

It sits near the edge of his bedside table so as to be closer to him. It is the first thing he lays his eyes on before dawn and the last thing he sees at night.

 

It is a substitute. It is frozen, in this Mediterranean breeze, stuck in this Italian summer, unchanging, ever present and never aging, and therefore escaping Death - precisely how Elio wants him to be; his pluperfect lover, his _ Fair Youth _ . 

 

Elio doesn't know when his parents found out about his Oliver; if it worsens their fear or worry, they haven't said. Mafalda has seen the final version, that he was sure of. She has to come to his room twice every day. And when he and his family leave for Milan, she will be his only visitor, and would dust him every now and then, as if to remind him 'your Poet hasn't forgotten you, but you belong here, in his Mithraic chamber that he calls his summer house.' 

 

That is what he tells his Oliver before leaving, you belong here. In Milan, or in anywhere else in this world, you will crumble, decay, you will change, and I forbid you to change. You are happy here. And here, I am leaving an immortal part of myself, which is just as stuck as you are - which is you, because I am your creator, your father, and as a piece of the artist lives in his art, I have molded you with a piece of myself, you live within me and I within you; the morning light has failed to, but I, Elio, your Helios, give you life - as two frozen figures on an ancient urn whose lips are forever two inches apart, burning with desire and passion, but two inches apart for eternity, yet finding pleasure in procuring eternal youth and a chance to look into the eyes of their beloved and live with that ache of longing forever. And after pressing his lips against his Oliver's, wearing his billowy and his star of David, he says, here, let these two entities, who are frozen in eternity, let them live as ghosts in this summer house where now autumn approaches. And I will be back when the Mediterranean breeze touches your cheek.

**Author's Note:**

> There are nods to the book that I'm not taking the credit of.
> 
> "Touch has a memory" is a line from Keats' _What Can I Do to Drive Away_
> 
> The lover on the urn is also taken from one of Keats' poems. _Ode on a Gracian Urn_
> 
>  _Fair Youth_ is of course from Shakespeare's Fair Youth sonnets.
> 
> Thanks to SailogS on Tumblr for allowing me to post this fic here and for making such beautiful art!


End file.
